Are Puerto Ricans White?

Jonathan
Harrison, an HNN Contributing Editor, is an adjunct Professor in
Sociology at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) and Hodges
University whose PhD was in the field of racism and anti-Semitism.

When Donald Trump
slandered
Puerto Ricans as being lazy and having a dependency culture, Fox News
host Tucker Carlson stated
that Trump's attacks could not be racist because "Puerto
Rico is 75 percent white, according to the U.S. Census." This
was a fallacy of the excluded middle because it ignored the fact that
someone could be classed as white by one organization but treated as
non-white by another, due to the way in which “race” is socially
constructed in variable ways depending on factors such as time
period, region and class.

Whiteness for Puerto
Ricans is subject to contradiction, whereby one can be advantaged on
one continuum (such as skin color) but disadvantaged on many others.
Puerto Ricans have greater divisions by class than they do by “race,”
due to the fact that employers seek professionals and the unskilled
in an increasingly polarized job structure (see discussion here).
They benefit from being citizens compared to the “undocumented”
and those perceived to be “illegals,” but they can be unwanted
for temporary work on the mainland because they cannot be deported
after their contracts expire. They can produce prized celebrities
(such as Jennifer Lopez) but be exposed to cultural racism, whereby
“the culture of groups is
naturalized in terms of some notion of inferior versus superior
nature”(Grosfoguel,
1999).
Furthermore, the bureaucrats and opinion formers who assign Puerto
Ricans their “race” are often inconsistent in their labelling
practices because sometimes it is convenient to deny the population
the privileges attached to whiteness, such as when distributing
federal resources like hurricane relief.

Tucker Carlson's fallacy
is also ignorant (or pretends to be) regarding Puerto Rico's
racialization in previous periods. The island came under American
rule at the height of American nativism and biological racism, which
portrayed the islanders as infantile monkeys in cartoon such as this
one:

Puerto Ricans did
not have a concept of race in the way it evolved in the mainland,
so part of their experience of being colonized was the culture shock
of the dissonance between their fluid notions of color, which contain
at least twenty categories and the fixed hypodescent of the American
model, which imposed a dichotomy between a privileged white race and
a stigmatized black one that was designed to protect the privileges
of slavery and segregation from "miscegenation" and
boundary crossing. Clara
Rodriguez has shown
how Puerto Ricans who migrated to the mainland had to conform to this
white-black duality that bore no relation to their
self-identifications. White was chosen by those who were light enough
to have the option, simply in order to avoid the disadvantage and
stigma of being seen as black bodied. Moreover, the census only gave
Puerto Ricans two options, white or non-white, with the latter
understood to be pejorative, so respondents who would have (as
Clarence
Gravlee notes) identified themselves as "indio,
moreno, mulato, prieto, jabao, and the most common term, trigueño
(literally, ‘wheat-colored’)" chose white by default. The
falseness of the results is shown by the fact that, after the census
made it easier for respondents to choose other
for race, they often wrote in their national identity (Puerto Rican)
instead of their “race,” as did other Latinos.

Choosing the white option
did not protect Puerto Ricans from discrimination. When the federal
government gave loans to white homebuyers after 1945, Puerto Ricans
were usually excluded on zonal grounds, being subjected to redlining
alongside African Americans. Such redlining was also found to be
operating on Puerto Rico itself in the insurance market as
late as 1998, suggesting it may have contributed to the
destitution faced by islanders after natural disasters.

Puerto Ricans who came to
the mainland to work in agriculture found themselves being cast as
“alien labor” despite their US citizenship, and were also
unpopular because they expected greater protections than did
Jamaicans or Bahamians. In the 1950s, they were scapegoated for
instances of high crime and infectious diseases. In at least one case
in Florida, their children subjected to exclusion from both white and
schools, making it necessary for them to establish a classroom in
their labor camp.

The racist treatment of
Puerto Ricans therefore has, for many decades, perpetuated a paradox
of whiteness without White Privilege. There have been advantages in
being "not black" and "not Mexican" but not the
freedom to seek employment, housing and insurance without fear of
exclusion or disadvantageous terms. When a hurricane strikes, Puerto
Rico finds itself closer to New Orleans than to Florida.